R5 final release information

Hi all - wattOS R5 has finally been released. There will be a lot of information from me updating the web site over the next 12 hours, but for you early adopters and the formal "release" notes for distrowatch consumption later today, etc..but, here are the basics.

Kernel - 3.0.0-16 - tested 3.2 did not see an appreciable advantage for the focus areas I was interested in, so kept the Kernel at 3.0 - seems stable and in line with the upstream.

Apps - Lots of little changes here - I also spent considerable time testing various power management apps and settings, and have measured power consumption of Windows 7, wattOS R4 and R5 and will post some data on that. Interesting, but what I know is the R5 will run consuming much less power giving you the ability to tweak consumption pretty well. These are real world consumption figures at the outlet with a "Kill a Watt" power meter, not synthetic benchmarks. So while it was not a purely scientific exercise, it should translate directly into real world usage.

- Midori web browser - changed to Midori for a lighter weight experience. Not as mature as Chromium of course, and others will need that, but for the basics it works well, and I have flash integrated with it.

- Utility apps from last release - most have been updated several revs. Changed from wicd to network manager - along with the notifications. (so all you VPN, 3G, mobile connectivity folks will be happy), added the software update manager as well and it checks once a week for security related updates, added the language support tools and kept the langage selection menus intact at boot for LXDM which had previously been disabled. Printing should work out of the box.

- Graphics - Changed to Pinta - kind of a lightweight gimp. Much easier to use, but more full featured and has a UI that most people will take to pretty quickly I think.

- Sound and VIdeo - kept Audacious (with stream browing and playing configured by default) added Braseo back in (probably last release with a CD burning utility, added cheese for web cam support, and changed to SMPlayer for video.

- Power management - added Jupiter (lighting bolt in panel) which will greatly help in a quick way to adjust power settings (either automatically or manually). and control peripherals, wifi, bluetooth, etc. Additionally the xfce power management tool and ACPI seem better this time around, powertop updates which seems to work much better. I have been able to tweak stock settings and see a real power consumption figure decrease by 30% at the outlet in the wall using these tools. There will be a separate post regarding some tweaks for Jupiter so you control freaks can have granular control over that rather than just "automatic" which is the default.

- Have been able to keep memory utilitzation down. On the multple systems I have tested, most average well under 100MB sitting at the desktop .

More to come later and some more tips on some things, but that should get you going :)

Cool thanks for all the kind words :) - be sure to check out the "wattOS Information" link at the top to see a bit more release info, and stick around as I will be posting some power consumption figures over the next few days as well.....tks....biff